I'm looking to setup Raid 1 on my personal computer. This will provide me a backup of my school, financial documents, and personal documents without the hassle of manually syncing specific folders from my main drive to my second drive as my files are kept all over the place. However, my problem is my motherboard (P5QL Pro) Does not support RAID as it is a relatively cheap board. Looking at controller cards they seem to run for 200-300$+ which is not what I was looking for either. What can I expect from a software RAID setup. Again this isn't for server use so performance isn't a huge issue unless it severely cripples my day to day/gaming use. Also, what software should I be looking to use?
I believe software RAID is slower but not that slow. The initial may be slow but since you are still using 2 hard drives it may be somewhat fast, I have never tried it though. I know that you are not going to get the speed improvement of RAID1 through software. This isn't a bad card. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816132013
